How can Pascagoula improve? Here’s what 3 mayor candidates said before Feb. 11 election.
The three candidates vying to become the new mayor of Pascagoula all shared passion and love for their city as they made attempts to sway voters during a forum on Thursday morning.
Dr. Steve Demetropoulos, Chris Grace and Burt Hill engaged in debate at the Jackson County Chamber of Commerce headquarters before approximately 60 attentive citizens.
The trio are battling to win the special election on Feb. 11. The winner will fill the seat vacated by Dane Maxwell, who was elected in November to the Mississippi Public Service Commission, representing the Southern District.
All three candidates gave their separate views on how to address the city’s most glaring issue of suffering the biggest population decline of all Mississippi Gulf Coast municipal areas over the past 10 years, according to the Chamber, who hosted the debate.
“We know why our people are leaving,” said Demetropoulos, a family physician with Singing River Health System, who listed the high cost of flood insurance and the lack of quality housing and new businesses.
“We can talk about everything, but how do we solve it? We need to bring our people, our stakeholders together to solve our problems.”
Grace, a sales representative who serves on the city’s Parks and Recreation Commission, said the population decline began even before the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He called for a refreshed outreach initiative among the city’s community groups.
“We need to try and cater to the residents we have; for example, we have a growing Hispanic community,” Grace said. Our citizens are a real important part of Pascagoula, we need them back. We need to develop new apartments, houses and businesses. We need to make our renters permanent residents.”
Hill, a former city councilman, put emphasis on selling and advertising the city, particularly on the positive qualities it possesses now.
“There’s some good things downtown that people don’t know about; we’ve got to sell that,” said Hill. We have a big asset with the water, with (businesses) Ingalls and Chevron and our schools are doing well. We have to do everything we can to advertise Pascagoula, to sell it.”
Demetropoulos also touched on better promoting the city’s resources.
“We don’t have widespread dispersal of news outside of our city,” he said.
Grace spoke about a more personal form of outreach, getting the churches in the city to revisit door-to-door contacts.
Hill proposed taking advantage of resources like the new state lottery, and assuring the city gets its fair portion of the revenue and taxes it generates.
“We need to get more money from the state so that we can reduce our city taxes,” Hill said.
The candidates also spoke on bringing in more festivals, embracing the city’s racial diversity, and attracting more high-paying jobs.
If neither of the candidates acquire more than 50% of the vote on Feb. 11, the runoff election will take place March 3.
The winner serves the rest of the term that expires June 30, 2021.
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.